The true basis of morality is utility; that is, the adaptation of our actions to the promotion of the general welfare and happiness; the endeavour so to rule our lives that we may serve and bless mankind.
Annie Besant
Emma had only been working in the factory for a year. At first, she ignored the tooth aches and the swelling of her gums. She was happy that she had the job which despite the long hours and hard conditions afforded her a salary allowing her to feed her three children and put a roof above their heads in that small and cramped tenement in Dorset Street. Eventually, the pain become unbearable and when she finally managed to save the fee for the local physician, a rather aloof and stern middle-aged man, he diagnosed Emma with a case of ‘phossy jaw’. Emma already knew. Two of her work colleagues, Mrs Murphy and Miss Ingham had already caught the disease. Mrs Murphy was lucky that her husband, a coach man, had savings and a good job as well as a kind disposition but there was nobody who took care of poor Miss Ingham who had emigrated from Liverpool and was alone in the world. One morning her body was found in the Embankment, her petty coat filled with stones.
Emma already knew what the tooth pain and the yellowing of her skin meant but the words of the physician had a catalyzing effect, and she started to cry. The physician reprimanded her and asked her to leave. It was time for his lunch, and he didn’t want a stupid, hysterical woman crying in his office. Emma’s husband had died of cholera last summer. She too was alone. What would her children do once the full effects of the sickness hit her? The foul discharges, the deformation. If luck was on her side, she would be able to get operated on which would turn her into a monster as the jawbone would be taken out completely making her look like that poor fellow, John Merrill. Emma fell to her knees and cried. One of the passers-by shouted out ‘Get out of the way, you silly moo!’
The above is a fictionalized account. But phossy jaw, with all its horrid connotations was real and people like Emma and her two other fictional colleagues lived and suffered an unbearable fate. The white phosphorus of the matches and the total lack of health and safety measures or of an understanding of health and safety in the workplace caused this awful disease back in the 19th Century.
Most of us, members of Le Droit Humain, know that Annie Besant was a Freemason and a Theosophist, but we must never forget that she was also a Fabian, a socialist, a secularist reformer and a feminist. Besant had suffered abuse during her marriage to Reverend Frank Besant. In 1857 Annie Besant was arrested and almost imprisoned for defending birth control alongside activist Charles Knowlton.
It is true that later in her life, as a Theosophist, Annie Besant changed her mind on birth control and left behind her earlier atheism. She went on to support Irish Rule and the independence of India, but I think that one of her most important, if often overlooked victories was her involvement in the matchgirls strike of 1888. She did this in person but also via the publication of articles such as White Slavery in London published in her newspaper the link in June 1888. Although the article in question does not allude to the occupational hazard to which the workers in the match factory were exposed to (‘phossy jaw’) it does give a good indication of the inhumane conditions to which workers were subject to in the period:
No sign of the "legal attention" announced in such hot haste by Mr. Theodore Bryant last week has yet reached me, but Messrs. Bryant and May have not been idle. They apparently shirk the straightforward course of prosecuting me for libel, knowing full well that my statements are true and can be proved up to the hilt, and they fear the publicity that such a suit would give to their shameful treatment of the helpless girls they employ. Determined, however, to revenge themselves for the exposure of their iniquities, they have fallen on the girls themselves, selecting as victims three. In order to make the punishment of these as heavy as possible, they did not dismiss them at once but kept them on for a week making their work very slack, and finally discharged one of the me with 2s. 8d. for her week's wages, promising a second 3s. 6d., and a third 1s. 8d. These wages are to pay for food and rent for the week. it is hard to understand what kind of non-human beings they can be who can put into a woman-child's hand 1s. 8d. as the price of her week's labor, and then bid her go forth workless into the cruel streets. How can a man do this thing, and go home to his comfortable house, and perhaps to wife and child? What if his daughter hereafter should receive similar treatment at the hands of a man like himself? Or what if these trampled ones at last should revolt against their tyrants, and in some wild hour of popular fury pay back such mercy as they have received? Men speak of "the furies of the Revolution" with horror and loathing; but who dare judge harshly if such seed as Bryant and May are a-sowing yield similar harvest, and if the maddened poor are pitiless to these who have been pitiless to them
[1] The Link, 1888 http://www.mernick.org.uk/thhol/thelink.html
This article had a great impact and almost 1,500 factory girls went on strike. The famous suffragette and activist Emmeline Pankhurst became involved in the strike leading to the creation of a Matchgirls Union which was leaded by Annie Besant. By 1901, Gilbert Bartholomew, the managing director of the factory (Bryant & May) stopped using phosphorus in his factories. I think that it is fair to say that this was a direct result of the activism spear headed by Besant and others.
Annie Besant was a Freemason and a Theosophist. She believed in a Supreme Being or Higher Power, but she was also a committed socialist and a reformer. None of these attributes are mutually exclusive. What an honor and a privilege for us Co- Masons in 2024 to be able to look back to Annie Besant as a beacon of Masonic light and inspiration.
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